42 generated memorable swells-"J anu- ary 9, 1983," Mark says dreamily, "and February 16, 1986"-are taped to the door of his study. Another news- paper photograph on the door shows a surfer on a wave, with the caption "Some Easterners think surfing is done with trick photography." I once read this caption out loud, and it reminded Jessica of a visitor from N e York City who stood at their living-room window and, gazing out on a scene of fearsome, fifteen-foot Ocean Beach surf, said, "Now I see why they call it the Pacific. The ocean is much wilder back East." B EFORE the arrival of Europeans in the Pacific, surfing was prac- ticed throughout Oceania-in Hawaii, Polynesia, New Guinea, even New Zealand. Captain James Cook, the British explorer, saw canoe surfing and bodysurfing in the Society Islands in 1777 and standup board surfing in the Hawaiian Islands in 1778. Cook was fascinated, and so were many of the traders, missionaries, and journal- ists who followed him, including Mark Twain and Jack London. In Hawaii, surfing had religious significance-after prayers and offerings, skilled crafts- men made boards from sacred koa or wiliwili trees-and it was practiced by men and women, young and old, roy- alty and peasantry. As Leonard Lueras notes in "Surfing: The Ultimate Plea- sure," the sport allowed for fashion statements; a visiting British sea cap- tain, a cousin of Lord Byron, wrote that "to have a neat floatboard, well- kept, and dried, is to a Sandwich Is- lander what a tilbury or cabriolet, or whatever light carriage may be in fashion is to a young English man." When the surf was good, "all thought of work is at an end, only that of sport is left," wrote Kepelino Keauokalani, a nineteenth-century Hawaiian scholar. "An day there is nothing but surfing. Many go out surfing as early as four in the morning." This was not what the Calvinist missionaries who began arriving in Hawaii in 1820 had in mind for the islanders as a way of life. Hiram Bingham, who led the first mis ionary party, which found itself in a crowd of surfers before it had even landed, wrote, "The appearance of destitution, deg- AUGUST 24, 1992 radation, and barbarism, among the chattering, and almost naked savages, whose heads and feet, and much of their sunburnt skins were bare, was appalling. Some of our number, with gushing tears, turned away from the spectacle." Twenty-seven years later, 'Bingham wrote, "The decline and discontinuance of the use of the surf- board, as civilization advances, may be accounted for by the increase in mod- esty, industry or religion." He was not wrong about the decline of surfing. Hawaiian culture had been destroyed, and the people decimated by European diseases; between 1778 and 1893, the Hawaiian population shrank from three hundred thousand to forty thousand, and by the end of the last century surfing had an but disappeared. A few Hawaiians kept the sport alive during the early years of this century, and a young Irish-Hawaiian named George Freeth, whom Jack London had made famous as "a brown Mercury" in his book "The Cruise of the Snark," went to Southern Califor- nia in 1907 to give public surfing demonstrations; he travelled at the expense of Henry Huntington, who 1992 American Express Travel Related ServIces Company Inc . YOU ARE HERE 'I{ t .. I>fIt Introducin g a Travelers Che g ue for cou les